Changes planned for UK jury service
Key Points
- The House of Lords Justice and Home Affairs Committee has opened an inquiry into the health and mental health impact of jury service in England and Wales.
- Around 350,000 people are summoned for jury service each year using the electoral register.
- Manchester Metropolitan University research found 94% of former jurors surveyed did not access formal support such as a GP or mental health professional.
- The committee is asking who is responsible for juror wellbeing, what support exists, and whether rules should stop jurors seeing distressing evidence unnecessarily.
- Written submissions close at 23.59 on Sunday 13 September, and the committee particularly wants to hear from people who have served.
The House of Lords Justice and Home Affairs Committee has launched an inquiry into support for jurors in England and Wales, covering the roughly 350,000 people summoned for jury service each year.
The inquiry examines the health and mental health impact of serving on a jury, the support available before, during and after a trial, and where responsibility for juror wellbeing sits.
It also asks what people can do at the selection stage if they have concerns about the material they may see, and how courts should balance that against juries reflecting the wider population.
The committee has issued an accompanying call for evidence with ten questions, and invites responses to any of them.
“For far too long their experience has not been heard and analysed,” said Lord Foster of Bath, chair of the Justice and Home Affairs Committee.
Foster said many jurors value the experience and return to their lives enriched by it, but that available research shows a sizeable minority find it deeply affecting, and that jurors must then return to work and family while remaining legally barred from discussing much of what they went through.
Courts in England and Wales currently signpost jurors to the Samaritans and their GP rather than providing specialist support, and the Ministry of Justice ran a counselling pilot across 15 crown courts.
Scotland operates a dedicated counselling service for jurors, a model the British Psychological Society has urged the government to replicate across England and Wales. The committee wants evidence on those differences, and on lessons from Northern Ireland, the Crown Dependencies and other common law jurisdictions.
Research from Manchester Metropolitan University, based on responses from 483 former jurors, found 94% did not access formal support such as a GP or mental health professional in connection with their service, and around four in five did not turn to family or friends.
Earlier work by the same team recorded a fourfold rise in signs of post-traumatic stress among mock jurors exposed to murder case material, with 44% showing symptoms seven days later.
The inquiry follows the Courts and Tribunals Bill, which passed its second reading in the Commons in March and would remove a defendant’s right to elect jury trial for either-way offences and allow judge-only trials for some cases. That bill has drawn scrutiny to the future of jury trials, though it does not address juror support.
Rules on jury deliberations restrict what jurors can say afterwards, and discussing deliberations is an offence under section 20 of the Juries Act 1974 as amended by the Criminal Justice and Courts Act 2015.
The committee asks how those rules affect the support jurors can access, and whether further guidance is needed to keep jurors off trials they are likely to find traumatic. Written submissions close at 23h59 on Sunday 13 September, and the committee has said it would particularly welcome evidence from people who have served on juries.
